A Corpus-based Study On Vocabulary Teaching Of NSEC In Senior High School

Vocabulary is the basic element of a language.And for language learners,vocabulary acquisition turns out to be one of the most significant and painstaking tasks in the learning process.With the advent of information age and the development of computer technology,the last twenty years have witnessed the increasing interest of researchers in the computer corpora and corpus linguistics,which have been introduced to the theoretical and practical application of language teaching.However,according to the previous literature,the direct use of corpora in teaching has been largely confined to university students,and as for in senior high school,corpus-based approach to language teaching is still a new field to be explored.With a specialized self-built corpus of NSEC and the concordance tool AntConc,this thesis illustrated and probed into five aspects in which corpus can be applied in vocabulary teaching and learning in senior high school so as to analyze the feasibility of such corpus-based approach and its effectiveness compared with traditional methods.The effectiveness of vocabulary learning was measured in terms of meaning,depth knowledge and retention of vocabulary.An experiment was conducted during the process.The subjects of the experiment were 80 senior high school students from two natural classes,of which one class was chosen as the control group and the other as the experiment group.The research instruments adopted in this study include corpus,software,pre-test,immediate post-test and delayed post-test.The data were collected from the three tests and later analyzed by the software Excel and SPSS.The data collected revealed that,whether in the immediate post-test or in the delayed post-test,the difference between the experiment group and the control group was much more significant than in the pre-test on the whole,suggesting that the corpus-based approach is more effective than the traditional methods in helping students with vocabulary learning.The results also indicated that there existed some limitations within the experiment itself:the relatively short duration of the experiment,the low vocabulary competence of the participants,the lack of proper skills and experience of the teacher,and inadequate computer corpora and equipment.Therefore,things need to be improved in these aspects in the future researches.